After more than a decade and a half of reforms to the funding of South African public schools, concerns persist about the efficient use of resources in schools that do not perform well on standardised tests of achievement. There seems to be near universal consensus that further funding increases to public schools that serve poor communities will not help arrest performance deficits in these schools. South Africa’s persistently poor performance in international achievement tests provides proponents of this view with powerful ammunition, especially when performance in South Africa’s public schools is compared with that of its poorer neighbours in Southern and East Africa.

The government’s response to this line of research has been revealing. On the one hand, it appears to have accepted the view that a large percentage of South African public schools continues to let poor learners and poor communities down. This view has found strong favour, especially with the National Treasury under the former Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel. Even the national Department of Education has tried several strategies to get poorly performing schools to work. On the other hand, the same government has continued to pursue a resources agenda that channels an increasingly large share of education resources to poor and poorly performing schools.

Thus, on the surface at least, one may argue that the government has not been completely swayed by those who believe that better resources will not make a difference to schools’ overall academic achievement. This default position could also be due to political pressures in the ruling African National Congress and its tripartite alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, which induce education authorities, to pursue a political and policy agenda over which they do not have control.

Examining the present policy landscape, it seems clear that quantitative researchers that question the resources-outcomes nexus have not succeeded in deflecting the South African government from its stated aim of providing better resources to poor and poorly performing schools.

I would argue that although the present funding system is far from perfect, we should continue to advocate the better funding of public schools, especially while South African quantitative education mresearch is still in its formative stages regarding access to high-quality data surveys, estimation methods and research sophistication. I will have more to say about this in my short review of the international and local literature, but the critical point is that we do not yet have a critical mass of quantitative education researchers who carefully review and study one another’s work or who are steeped in the recent methodological trends and innovations so evident in the international literature.

I am also not aware of any major public debates within the small community of researchers who pursue quantitative research in education, and this is symptomatic of the challenges facing researchers in this area (resources-outcomes) and other relevant areas. Such debates tend to sharpen the way researchers measure variables of interest, drive the demand for better-quality surveys and help researchers construct careful policy advice for policy-makers who do not understand the intricacies of high-end research. Also, the gap between researchers in education employing qualitative and quantitative methods has not helped the development of sophisticated quantitative research that could, as Harvey Goldstein (1981) argues, better approximate the complex realities that define education systems.

This paper pursues the following main aims:

• It sets out to provide a brief review of the international and local literature that examines the relationship between resources and outcomes (section 2). None of the trenchant critiques of quantitative methodologies are included in this review and recent debates about how to define the “effectiveness” of schools are only mentioned briefly. There is a much larger literature on this subject, but for mpresent purposes this short review attempts to highlight key methodological and empirical findings in this area.
• It uses South African Grade 6 data from the Systemic Evaluation Survey released in 2004 and offers an exploratory analysis of the relationships between resources and outcomes in South African public primary schools (section 3).
• It suggests areas for further research that would not only address the controversial issue of school resources and outcomes but also begin to deal with the large socioeconomic gaps that define public primary and secondary schooling in South Africa.